Marvel’s Tom Brevoort Disses DC
Safe to say there isn’t a lot of love lost between Marvel and DC these days, with that writers’ spat over Secret Invasion
Now over at Marvel’s Cup o’ Joe column at MySpace, editor Tom Brevoort has gone straight middle school on the other New York comics giant. In addition to previewing some Secret Invasion pages, Brevoort writes:
I want to announce that I’m not at all interested in replacing Dan DiDio at DC after he is booted three weeks ago, and I haven’t taken many secret, high-powered meetings with key DC and Warner’s executives, who’ve long admired my great success with Civil War and Secret Invasion and New Avengers and so forth. Dan’s doing an excellent job over there, and I’m sure I couldn’t raise their market share by 10%, 15% or 20%. Despite the fact that many top-selling, exclusive Marvel creators have called me up in response to the rumblings to let me know that they’d love to work on a DC project for me if I was running things over there and begging me to consider it, I’m not remotely intrigued by the possibility. If called, I will not answer; if I answer, I will not parley; if I parley, I will not accept the job; and if I accept the job, I will not work very hard. So there’s no truth to the wildfire speculation that links me at the hip to that position, and makes me the obvious next choice to sit in that chair. Just to make that all perfectly clear.
Ouch. I’m sure it’s all in good fun for Brevoort or Marvel, but that has to sting for DC, which has had some serious struggles lately. And, as someone who was at Heroes Con watching DiDio as those rumors came to a head, let’s just say he didn’t look like a happy guy.
Are Marvel and DC still playing softball against each other? If so, this year I’d watch out for the cleats.
I think Tom's comment was pretty clever. Lots of names were bandied about as potential replacements for Mr. DiDio.A month ago, everybody and their mother (except Dan's mother) was saying Dan was on the way out. The comics media was on high alert, and some big name columnists were breathlessly braying "I know something's gonna happen any minute now." Then Dan showed up at Heroes Con and at Wizard World Chicago and even at work. Unless he disappears before San Diego, I think a lot of folks owe him an apology.As for the quality of Secret Invasion and Final Crisis, we, as readers, can praise or rail against either or both. We also vote with our pocketbooks every time we go to the comics store. We don't have to take our frustrations into the realm of predicting the future.Besides, the line "if I accept the job, I will not work very hard" is great.
"…many top-selling, exclusive Marvel creators have called me up in response to the rumblings to let me know that they'd love to work on a DC project for me if I was running things over there and begging me to consider it…"And trying to instill discontent.And this after DiDio was friendly to him a few weeks ago. Backstabber.
I saw this as satire; in context, fairly funny. That's just me, though. Always willing to give people the benefit of the doubt. Believe me, I've been in the situation where I shifted over to DC Comics and brought a lot of my previous collaborators with me. It has an ENTIRELY different feel than that suggested by Tom's comments.Kinda fun, though.
Like I said in the post, I don't doubt for a second that it's all in jest, and it was definitely funny. But I'm guessing the folks at DC still won't take it well, if only because they're pretty sore over all the problems, real and imagined, that they've gone through of late.
That's understandable, but that's also their problem. Those that know Tom won't have a problem; one can forgive Dan if he's simply had enough of this crap in general.